The King of Arcadia
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Ballard laughed.
"I am sorry if I have spoiled it for you. But you couldn't make a dramatic situation out of a careless quarryman's overloading of a shot-hole."
"Oh, no," said the playwright, apparently giving it up. And he smoked his pipe out in silence.
Ballard thought the incident was comfortably dead and buried, but he did not know his man. Long after Wingfield might be supposed to have forgotten all about the stone catapulting, he sat up suddenly and broke out again.
"Say! you explained to Miss Dosia that the stone couldn't possibly have come from the quarry without knocking the science of artillery into a cocked hat. She made a point of that."
"Oh, hold on!" protested the Kentuckian. "You mustn't hold me responsible for a bit of dinner-table talk with a very charming young woman. Perhaps Miss Dosia wished to be mystified. I put it to you as man to man; would you have disappointed her?"
The playwright's laugh showed his fine teeth.
"They tell me you are at the top of the heap in your profession, Mr. Ballard, and I can easily believe it. But I have a specialty, too, and I'm no slouch in it. My little stunt is prying into the inner consciousness of things. Obviously, there is a mystery – a real mystery – about this stone-throwing episode, and for some reason you are trying to keep me from dipping into it. Conversely, I'd like to get to the bottom of it. Tell me frankly, is there any good reason why I shouldn't?"
Ballard's salvation for this time personified itself in the figure of Contractor Fitzpatrick darkening the door of the office to ask a "question of information," as he phrased it. Hence there was an excuse for a break and a return to the sun-kissed stone yard.
The engineer purposefully prolonged the talk with Fitzpatrick until the scattered sight-seers had gathered for a descent, under Jerry Blacklock's lead, to the great ravine below the dam where the river thundered out of the cut-off tunnel. But when he saw that Miss Craigmiles had elected to stay behind, and that Wingfield had attached himself to the younger Miss Cantrell, he gave the contractor his information boiled down into a curt sentence or two, and hastened to join the stay-behind.
"You'll melt, out here in the sun," he said, overtaking her as she stood looking down into the whirling vortex made by the torrent's plunge into the entrance of the cut-off tunnel.
She ignored the care-taking phrase as if she had not heard it.
"Mr. Wingfield? – you have kept him from getting interested in the – in the – "
Ballard nodded.
"He is interested, beyond doubt. But for the present moment I have kept him from adding anything to Miss Dosia's artless gossip. Will you permit me to suggest that it was taking rather a long chance? – your bringing him down here?"
"I know; but I couldn't help it. Dosia would have brought him on your invitation. I did everything I could think of to obstruct; and when they had beaten me, I made a party affair of it. You'll have to forgive me for spoiling an entire working day for you."
"Since it has given me a chance to be with you, I'm only too happy in losing the day," he said; and he meant it. But he let her know the worst in the other matter in an added sentence. "I'm afraid the mischief is done in Wingfield's affair, in spite of everything."
"How?" she asked, and the keen anxiety in the grey eyes cut him to the heart.
He told her briefly of the chance arousing of Wingfield's curiosity, and of the playwright's expressed determination to fathom the mystery of the table-smashing stone. Her dismay was pathetic.
"You should never have taken him into your office," she protested reproachfully. "He was sure to be reminded of Dosia's story there."
"I didn't foresee that, and he was beginning to gossip with the workmen. I knew it wouldn't be long before he would get the story of the happenings out of the men – with all the garnishings."
"You must find a way to stop him," she insisted. "If you could only know what terrible consequences are wrapped up in it!"
He waited until a stone block, dangling in the clutch of the derrick-fall above its appointed resting-place on the growing wall of masonry, had been lowered into the cement bed prepared for it before he said, soberly: "That is the trouble – I don't know. And, short of quarrelling outright with Wingfield, I don't think of any effective way of muzzling him."
"No; you mustn't do that. There is misery enough and enmity enough, without making any more. I'll try to keep him away."
"You will fail," he prophesied, with conviction. "Mr. Wingfield calls himself a builder of plots; but I can assure you from this one day's observation of him that he would much rather unravel a plot than build one."
She was silent while the workmen were swinging another great stone out over the canyon chasm. The shadow of the huge derrick-boom swept around and across them, and she shuddered as if the intangible thing had been an icy finger to touch her.
"You must help me," she pleaded. "I cannot see the way a single step ahead."
"And I am in still deeper darkness," he reminded her gently. "You forget that I do not know what threatens you, or how it threatens."
"I can't tell you; I can't tell any one," she said; and he made sure there was a sob at the catching of her breath.
As once before, he grew suddenly masterful.
"You are wronging yourself and me, Elsa, dear. You forget that your trouble is mine; that in the end we two shall be one in spite of all the obstacles that a crazy fate can invent."
She shook her head. "I told you once that you must not forget yourself again; and you are forgetting. There is one obstacle which can never be overcome this side of the grave. You must always remember that."
"I remember only that I love you," he dared; adding: "And you are afraid to tell me what this obstacle is. You know it would vanish in the telling."
She did not answer.
"You won't tell me that you are in love with Wingfield?" he persisted.
Still no reply.
"Elsa, dearest, can you look me in the eyes and tell me that you do not love me?"
She neither looked nor denied.
"Then that is all I need to know at present," he went on doggedly. "I shall absolutely and positively refuse to recognise any other obstacle."
She broke silence so swiftly that the words seemed to leap to her lips.
"There is one, dear friend," she said, with a warm upflash of strong emotion; "one that neither you nor I, nor any one can overcome!" She pointed down at the boulder-riven flood churning itself into spray in the canyon pot at their feet. "I will measure it for you – and for myself, God help us! Rather than be your wife – the mother of your children – I should gladly, joyfully, fling myself into that."
The motion he made to catch her, to draw her back from the brink of the chasm, was purely mechanical, but it served to break the strain of a situation that had become suddenly impossible.
"That was almost tragic, wasn't it?" she asked, with a swift retreat behind the barricades of mockery. "In another minute we should have tumbled headlong into melodrama, with poor Mr. Wingfield hopelessly out of reach for the note-taking process."
"Then you didn't mean what you were saying?" he demanded, trying hard to overtake the fleeing realities.
"I did, indeed; don't make me say it again. The lights are up, and the audience might be looking. See how manfully Mr. Bigelow is trying not to let Cousin Janet discover how she is crushing him!"
Out of the lower ravine the other members of the party were straggling, with Bigelow giving first aid to a breathless and panting Mrs. Van Bryck, and Wingfield and young Blacklock helping first one and then another of the four younger women. The workmen in the cutting yard were preparing to swing a third massive face-block into place on the dam; and Miss Craigmiles, quite her serene self again, was asking to be shown how the grappling hooks were made fast in the process of "toggling."
Ballard accepted his defeat with what philosophy he could muster, and explained the technical detail. Then the others came up, and the buckboards sent down from Castle 'Cadia to take the party home were seen wheeling into line at the upper end of the short foothill canyon.
"There is our recall at last, Mr. Ballard," gasped the breathless chaperon, "and I daresay you are immensely relieved. But you mustn't be too sorry for your lost day. We have had a perfectly lovely time."
"Such a delightful day!" echoed the two sharers of the common Christian name in unison; and the king's daughter added demurely: "Don't you see we are all waiting for you to ask us to come again, Mr. Ballard?"
"Oh, certainly; any time," said Ballard, coming to the surface. Notwithstanding, on the short walk up to the waiting buckboards he sank into the sea of perplexity again. Elsa's moods had always puzzled him. If they were not real, as he often suspected, they were artistically perfect imitations; and he was never quite sure that he could distinguish between the real and the simulated.
As at the present moment: the light-hearted young woman walking beside him up the steep canyon path was the very opposite of the sorely tried and anxious one who had twice let him see the effects of the anxiety, however carefully she concealed the cause.
The perplexed wonder was still making him half abstracted when he put himself in the way to help her into one of the homeward-headed vehicles. They were a little in advance of the others, and when she faced him to say good-bye, he saw her eyes. Behind the smile in them the troubled shadows were still lurking; and when the heartening word was on his lips they looked past him, dilating suddenly with a great horror.
"Look!" she cried, pointing back to the dam; and when he wheeled he saw that they were all looking; standing agape as if they had been shown the Medusa's head. The third great stone had been swung out over the dam, and, little by little, with jerkings that made the wire cables snap and sing, the grappling-hooks were losing their hold in mid-air. The yells of the workmen imperilled rose sharply above the thunder of the river, and the man at the winding-drums seemed to have lost his nerve and his head.
Young Blacklock, who was taking an engineering course in college, turned and ran back down the path, shouting like a madman. Ballard made a megaphone of his hands and bellowed an order to the unnerved hoister engineer. "Lower away! Drop it, you blockhead!" he shouted; but the command came too late. With a final jerk the slipping hooks gave way, and the three-ton cube of granite dropped like a huge projectile, striking the stonework of the dam with a crash like an explosion of dynamite.
Dosia Van Bryck's shriek was ringing in Ballard's ears, and the look of frozen horror on Elsa's face was before his eyes, when he dashed down the steep trail at Blacklock's heels. Happily, there was no one killed; no one seriously hurt. On the dam-head Fitzpatrick was climbing to a point of vantage to shout the news to the yard men clustering thickly on the edge of the cliff above, and Ballard went only far enough to make sure that there had been no loss of life. Then he turned and hastened back to the halted buckboards.
"Thank God, it's only a money loss, this time!" he announced. "The hooks held long enough to give the men time to get out of the way."
"There was no one hurt? Are you sure there was no one hurt?" panted Mrs. Van Bryck, fanning herself vigorously.
"No one at all. I'm awfully sorry we had to give you such a shock for your leave-taking, but accidents will happen, now and then. You will excuse me if I go at once? There is work to be done."
"H'm – ha! One moment, Mr. Ballard," rasped the major, swelling up like a man on the verge of apoplexy. But Mrs. Van Bryck was not to be set aside.
"Oh, certainly, we will excuse you. Please don't waste a moment on us. You shouldn't have troubled to come back. So sorry – it was very dreadful – terrible!"
While the chaperon was groping for her misplaced self-composure, Wingfield said a word or two to Dosia, who was his seat-mate, and sprang to the ground.
"Hold on a second, Ballard!" he called. "I'm going with you. What you need right now is a trained investigator, and I'm your man. Great Scott! to think that a thing like that should happen, and I should be here to see it!" And then to Miss Craigmiles, who appeared to be trying very earnestly to dissuade him: "Oh, no, Miss Elsa; I sha'n't get underfoot or be in Mr. Ballard's way; and you needn't trouble to send down for me. I can pad home on my two feet, later on."
XVIII
THE INDICTMENT
In the days following the episode of the tumbling granite block, Wingfield came and went unhindered between Castle 'Cadia and the construction camp at Elbow Canyon, sometimes with Jerry Blacklock for a companion, but oftener alone. Short of the crude expedient of telling him that his room was more to be desired than his company, Ballard could think of no pretext for excluding him; and as for keeping him in ignorance of the linked chain of accidents and tragedies, it was to be presumed that his first unrestricted day among the workmen had put him in possession of all the facts with all their exaggerations.
How deeply the playwright was interested in the tale of disaster and mysterious ill luck, no one knew precisely; not even young Blacklock, who was systematically sounded, first by Miss Craigmiles, and afterward at regular intervals by Ballard. As Blacklock saw it, Wingfield was merely killing time at the construction camp. When he was not listening to the stories of the men off duty, or telling them equally marvellous stories of his own, he was lounging in the adobe bungalow, lying flat on his back on the home-made divan with his clasped hands for a pillow, smoking Ballard's tobacco, or sitting in one of the lazy-chairs and reading with apparent avidity and the deepest abstraction one or another of Bromley's dry-as-dust text-books on the anatomy of birds and the taxidermic art.
"Whatever it is that you are dreading in connection with Wingfield and the camp 'bogie' isn't happening," Ballard told the king's daughter one morning when he came down from Bromley's hospital room at Castle 'Cadia and found Elsa waiting for him under the portières of the darkened library. "For a man who talks so feelingly about the terrible drudgery of literary work, your playwriter is certainly a striking example of simon-pure laziness. He is perfectly innocuous. When he isn't half asleep on my office lounge, or dawdling among the masons or stone-cutters, he is reading straight through Bromley's shelf of bird-books. He may be absorbing 'local color,' but if he is, he is letting the environment do all the work. I don't believe he has had a consciously active idea since he began loafing with us."
"You are mistaken – greatly mistaken," was all she would say; and in the fulness of time a day came when the event proved how far a woman's intuition may outrun a man's reasoning.
It was the occasion of Bromley's first return to the camp at Elbow Canyon, four full weeks after the night of stumbling on the steep path. Young Blacklock had driven him by the roundabout road in the little motor-car; and the camp industries paused while the men gave the "Little Boss" an enthusiastic ovation. Afterward, the convalescent was glad enough to lie down on the makeshift lounge in the office bungalow; but when Jerry would have driven him back in time for luncheon at Castle 'Cadia, as his strict orders from Miss Elsa ran, Bromley begged to be allowed to put his feet under the office mess-table with his chief and his volunteer chauffeur.
To the three, doing justice to the best that Garou could find in the camp commissary stores, came Mr. Lester Wingfield, to drag up a stool and to make himself companionably at home at the engineers' mess, as his custom had come to be. Until the meal was ended and the pipes were filled, he was silent and abstracted to the edge of rudeness. But when Ballard made a move to go down to the railroad yard with Fitzpatrick, the spell was broken.
"Hold up a minute; don't rush off so frantically," he cut in abruptly. "I have been waiting for many days to get you and Bromley together for a little confidential confab about matters and things, and the time has come. Sit down."
Ballard resumed his seat at the table with an air of predetermined patience, and the playwright nodded approval. "That's right," he went on, "brace yourself to take it as it comes; but you needn't write your reluctance so plainly in your face. It's understood."
"I don't know what you mean," objected Ballard, not quite truthfully.
Wingfield laughed.
"You didn't want me to come down here at first; and since I've been coming you haven't been too excitedly glad to see me. But that's all right, too. It's what the public benefactor usually gets for butting in. Just the same, there is a thing to be done, and I've got to do it. I may bore you both in the process, but I have reached a point where a pow-wow is a shrieking necessity. I have done one of two things: I've unearthed the most devilish plot that ever existed, or else I have stumbled into a mare's nest of fairly heroic proportions."
By this time he was reasonably sure of his audience. Bromley, still rather pallid and weak, squared himself with an elbow on the table. Blacklock got up to stand behind the assistant's chair. Ballard thrust his hands into his pockets and frowned. The moment had probably arrived when he would have to fight fire with fire for Elsa Craigmiles's sake, and he was pulling himself together for the battle.
"I know beforehand about what you are going to say," he interjected; "but let's have your version of it."
"You shall have it hot and hot," promised the playwright. "For quite a little time, and from a purely literary point of view, I have been interesting myself in the curious psychological condition which breeds so many accidents on this job of yours. I began with the assumption that there was a basis of reality. The human mind isn't exactly creative in the sense that it can make something out of nothing. You say, Mr. Ballard, that your workmen are superstitious fools, and that their mental attitude is chiefly responsible for all the disasters. I say that the fact – the cause-fact – existed before the superstition; was the legitimate ancestor of the superstition. Don't you believe it?"
Ballard neither affirmed nor denied; but Bromley nodded. "I've always believed it," he admitted.
"There isn't the slightest doubt of the existence of the primary cause-fact; it is a psychological axiom that it must antedate the diseased mental condition," resumed the theorist, oracularly. "I don't know how far back it can be traced, but Engineer Braithwaite's drowning will serve for our starting point. You will say that there was nothing mysterious about that; yet only the other day, Hoskins, the locomotive driver, said to me: 'They can say what they like, but I ain't believing that the river stove him all up as if he'd been stomped on in a cattle pen.' There, you see, you have the first gentle push over into the field of the unaccountable."
It was here that Ballard broke in, to begin the fire-fighting.
"You are getting the cart before the horse. It is ten chances to one that Hoskins never dreamed of being incredulous about the plain, unmistakable facts until after the later happenings had given him the superstitious twist."
"The sequence in this particular instance is immaterial – quite immaterial," argued the playwright, with obstinate assurance. "The fact stays with us that there was something partly unaccountable in this first tragedy to which the thought of Hoskins – the thoughts of all those who knew the circumstances – could revert."
"Well?" said Ballard.
"It is on this hypothesis that I have constructed my theory. Casting out all the accidents chargeable to carelessness, to disobedience of orders, or to temporary aberration on the part of the workmen, there still remains a goodly number of them carrying this disturbing atom of mystery. Take Sanderson's case: he came here, I'm told, with a decent record; he was not in any sense of the words a moral degenerate. Yet in a very short time he was killed in a quarrel over a woman at whom the average man wouldn't look twice. Blacklock, here, has seen this woman; but I'd like to ask if either of you two have?" – this to Ballard and the assistant.
Ballard shook his head, and Bromley confessed that he had not.
"Well, Jerry and I have the advantage of you – we have seen her," said Wingfield, scoring the point with a self-satisfied smile. "She is a gray-haired Mexican crone, apparently old enough, and certainly hideous enough, to be the Mexican foreman's mother. I'll venture the assertion that Sanderson never thought of her as a feminine possibility at all."
"Hold on; I shall be obliged to spoil your theory there," interrupted Bromley. "Billy unquestionably put himself in Manuel's hands. He used to go down to the ranch two or three times a week, and he spent money, a good bit of it, on the woman. I know it, because he borrowed from me. And along toward the last, he never rode in that direction without slinging his Winchester under the stirrup-leather."
"Looking for trouble with Manuel, you would say?" interjected Wingfield.
"No doubt of it. And when the thing finally came to a focus, the Mexican gave Billy a fair show; there were witnesses to that part of it. Manuel told Sanderson to take his gun, which the woman was trying to hide, get on his horse, and ride to the north corner of the corral, where he was to wheel and begin shooting – or be shot in the back. The programme was carried out to the letter. Manuel walked his own horse to the south corner, and the two men wheeled and began to shoot. Three or four shots were fired by each before Billy was hit."
"Um!" said the playwright thoughtfully. "There were witnesses, you say? Some of the Craigmiles cow-boys, I suppose. You took their word for these little details?"
Bromley made a sorrowful face. "No; it was Billy's own story. The poor fellow lived long enough to tell me what I've been passing on to you. He tried to tell me something else, something about Manuel and the woman, but there wasn't time enough."
Wingfield had found the long-stemmed pipe and was filling it from the jar of tobacco on the table. "Was that all?" he inquired.
"All but the finish – which was rather heart-breaking. When he could no longer speak he kept pointing to me and to his rifle, which had been brought in with him. I understood he was trying to tell me that I should keep the gun."
"You did keep it?"
"Yes; I have it yet."
"Let me have a look at it, will you?"
The weapon was found, and Wingfield examined it curiously. "Is it loaded?" he asked.
Bromley nodded. "I guess it is. It hasn't been out of its case or that cupboard since the day of the killing."
The playwright worked the lever cautiously, and an empty cartridge shell flipped out and fell to the floor. "William Sanderson's last shot," he remarked reflectively, and went on slowly pumping the lever until eleven loaded cartridges lay in an orderly row on the table. "You were wrong in your count of the number of shots fired, or else the magazine was not full when Sanderson began," he commented. Then, as Blacklock was about to pick up one of the cartridges: "Hold on, Jerry; don't disturb them, if you please."
Blacklock laughed nervously. "Mr. Wingfield's got a notion," he said. "He's always getting 'em."
"I have," was the quiet reply. "But first let me ask you, Bromley: What sort of a rifle marksman was Sanderson?"
"One of the best I ever knew. I have seen him drill a silver dollar three times out of five at a hundred yards when he was feeling well. There is your element of mystery again: I could never understand how he missed the Mexican three or four times in succession at less than seventy-five yards – unless Manuel's first shot was the one that hit him. That might have been it. Billy was all sand; the kind of man to go on shooting after he was killed."
"My notion is that he didn't have the slightest chance in the wide world," was Wingfield's comment. "Let us prove or disprove it if we can," and he opened a blade of his penknife and dug the point of it into the bullet of the cartridge first extracted from the dead man's gun. "There is my notion – and a striking example of Mexican fair play," he added, when the bullet, a harmless pellet of white clay, carefully moulded and neatly coated with lead foil, fell apart under the knife-blade.